3 ms·

As someone who's trying to bridge macOS's native APIs with Java for a future project, this is useful for me.

tambourine_man 3y ago
Believe it or not (i'm walking on air), there was a time when Apple had an official Cocoa-Java bridge . They were betting heavily on it, rewrote WebObjects on Java, etc. Then, for some reason, people began to realize ObjC was quite all right after all, despite its crazy bolted-on syntax, and it “caught on”, for some reason. Maybe because Mac OS X was already dog slow and memory hungry as it was to even consider Java. And, funnily enough, ObjC was the slower solution to C/C++ on Carbon, that they somehow menage to run on a phone with 128MB of RAM and a DVD player SOC.
- r618 3y ago
  just CD player initially first iOSs didn't support user's videos playback
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    It was a software limitation, IIRC. There were hacks that allowed you to record and play the small videos it generated.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Yeah, the Mac OS community was raised in Object Pascal and C++, Java came to be due to a mix of its initial hype, agreement with Sun, and fear that Objective-C would be too alien for the Mac developer community, due to its syntax and semantics. Copland was going to be a microkernel based with C++ frameworks, as an additional note, similar in spirit on how BeOS turned out to be. As that proven not to be an issue, and the community did indeed adopt it, they decided to cut down on costs of having multiple languages. A bit ironic, as we are back to the Object Pascal / C++ days, with two similar inspired languages.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    Microsoft was also “the enemy” and having the fastest, best integrated JVM was seen as an important competitive advantage. Regarding the influences, you mean Swift is inspired by C++ and ObjC by Object Pascal?
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      The enemy whose money rescued the company. Object Pascal => Swift, C++ => Objective-C, in terms of language culture.
      - tambourine_man 3y ago
        Not the money per se, more like committing to Office for Mac and IE. It also helped MS in a number of ways. On the languages front, I can’t see the parallel you draw.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Without the money, there wouldn't be any Apple left regardless, they were already quite red. I guess you weren't part of the community culture of the said languages, which is something that cannot be really explained in a HN comment.
fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
I wrote a bridge between macOS APIs and Common Lisp using the Objective-C runtime and it’s pretty nice to be able to work with system APIs at a high level, and not be forced down to “bag of bytes” C FFI. Hopefully, Apple’s move towards Swift will maintain the Objective-C runtime even if they eventually deprecate the language itself.

Believe it or not (i'm walking on air), there was a time when Apple had an official Cocoa-Java bridge . They were betting heavily on it, rewrote WebObjects on Java, etc. Then, for some reason, people began to realize ObjC was quite all right after all, despite its crazy bolted-on syntax, and it “caught on”, for some reason. Maybe because Mac OS X was already dog slow and memory hungry as it was to even consider Java. And, funnily enough, ObjC was the slower solution to C/C++ on Carbon, that they somehow menage to run on a phone with 128MB of RAM and a DVD player SOC.

r618 3y ago
just CD player initially first iOSs didn't support user's videos playback
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  It was a software limitation, IIRC. There were hacks that allowed you to record and play the small videos it generated.
pjmlp 3y ago
Yeah, the Mac OS community was raised in Object Pascal and C++, Java came to be due to a mix of its initial hype, agreement with Sun, and fear that Objective-C would be too alien for the Mac developer community, due to its syntax and semantics. Copland was going to be a microkernel based with C++ frameworks, as an additional note, similar in spirit on how BeOS turned out to be. As that proven not to be an issue, and the community did indeed adopt it, they decided to cut down on costs of having multiple languages. A bit ironic, as we are back to the Object Pascal / C++ days, with two similar inspired languages.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Microsoft was also “the enemy” and having the fastest, best integrated JVM was seen as an important competitive advantage. Regarding the influences, you mean Swift is inspired by C++ and ObjC by Object Pascal?
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    The enemy whose money rescued the company. Object Pascal => Swift, C++ => Objective-C, in terms of language culture.
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
      Not the money per se, more like committing to Office for Mac and IE. It also helped MS in a number of ways. On the languages front, I can’t see the parallel you draw.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Without the money, there wouldn't be any Apple left regardless, they were already quite red. I guess you weren't part of the community culture of the said languages, which is something that cannot be really explained in a HN comment.

fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago

I wrote a bridge between macOS APIs and Common Lisp using the Objective-C runtime and it’s pretty nice to be able to work with system APIs at a high level, and not be forced down to “bag of bytes” C FFI. Hopefully, Apple’s move towards Swift will maintain the Objective-C runtime even if they eventually deprecate the language itself.